LOCAL UNBINDING OF PINCHED MEMBRANES

Loosely bound membranes exhibit an unusual elastic response when pinched together by optical tweezers, locally unbinding to a large intermembrane distance. Tweezing a stack of many bound membranes produces extreme local swelling in the vicinity of the tweezing point. We introduce a model that incorporates bending elasticity, fluctuations, and intermembrane interactions to calculate the membrane profiles subject to a local pinch. Theoretically, we find strongly overshooting profiles in agreement with experiment. We predict scaling behavior of the overshoot with the pinch strength and size.